The bird perched on the woman’s shoulder moved impatiently. Everett’s stomach lurched. Not a bird. How had he mistaken it for one? The creature glistened, an amorphous shape, a sea-jelly turned inside out, but still nuzzling the woman’s ear. She stroked what might have been its head. The creature leaned into her touch, then, to Everett’s alarm, melted.
It flowed down her arm, circling her wrist. Somewhere between a liquid and a solid, it sucked at her fingertips, tasting each one, despite the lack of an obvious mouth. Or perhaps it was all mouths.
The woman’s eyes rolled back, lids fluttering over crescents of white. She shuddered, head to toe, lips parting to show a line of even teeth before coming back to herself with a contented smile. The creature slid back up her arm, settling on her shoulder again, most definitely an African Gray Parrot after all.
“Constance.” She made a half-curtsey. “Charmed.”
The bird watched Everett critically, head tilted, wicked-sharp beak opening and closing, daring him to speak. Constance pivoted, drifting between the shelves. Everett hurried to follow—Alice after the White Rabbit. He had cracked after all. Not a stroke, a complete break with reality. He’d lost his mind.
He caught sight of Constance through gaps between the books which hadn’t been there a moment ago, a ghost moving in a zoetrope. The door, the damned impossible door, moved to keep pace, stretching into the space around them, bending and flowing to fill the gaps where the books were not.
“This one is me.” Constance spoke next to his ear; somehow, she’d gotten behind him.
She held out a slim, saddle-stitched chapbook with a pale green cover. A faint pattern of deeper green lurked within pulped fiber so Everett had the sense of something both geometric and organic rising up toward him. He wanted to fling the book away, but it seemed to stick to his fingers. He imagined his skin grown tacky, stretching in long strands connected to the cover.
“Sexing the Weird by C.S. Bryant.” Constance touched the fancy script. “That’s me. I had it printed myself. Or rather, I didn’t. It’s the book I never had the courage to write.”
A wistful smile lifted half her mouth. The parrot thing on her shoulder nibbled her ear, a wet sound.
The ache behind Everett’s eyes crawled down his spine. A book that existed and did not exist; a door that was and wasn’t there. A rip in the universe, just around the corner, just like he’d always expected to find. But it was impossible. He’d given up on those fantasies long ago.
“Take it home with you.”
The book was in Everett’s hand though he didn’t remember accepting it.
“I’m always happy to reach a new reader.”
Constance winked, not just an eye, but her entire being, vanishing and taking the door with her. The air pressure returned to normal. Everett was alone.
Or had he been alone the whole time, hallucinating, talking to thin air? The book in his hand suggested otherwise, but maybe he’d plucked it off the shelf while having his imaginary conversation. Feeling foolish, he stuffed the book into his bag. He half-expected to find it vanished when his shift ended, but it remained, a not-altogether reassuring hand brushing his hip through the canvas satchel as he walked home in the pre-dawn light.
Everett sat on his bed, knees drawn up, Constance’s slim volume resting against them. Blackout curtains hid all but the barest cracks of daylight. He was a child again, reading by flashlight while Mrs. Stadhoff slept, surrounded by the hush of the night library.
Except this wasn’t the library. It was a one bedroom apartment on the edge of campus, and it was too easy to imagine the monster shattering the thin wood of the door. You think you’re too big for me to whip? Everett closed his eyes, swallowing hard. His father’s letter had found him, but that didn’t mean he was really coming. And if he did, Everett could just refuse to talk to him. He was an adult now, not a terrified child hiding under the bed, listening to the ragged breath on the other side of the door, waiting for the hand to close on his ankle and drag him out. Everett’s eyes flew open. He resisted the urge to push his dresser across the bedroom door.
He opened Constance’s book, trying to distract himself. He should be exhausted after working the graveyard shift, but he was too wired for sleep.
Flipping through the pages revealed the book as a haphazard collection of diary entries, transcribed conversations, and letters. The formatting changed from section to section. Everett turned back to the first section labeled, Transformation.
A stream-of-consciousness account of Constance’s life in Paris in the 1920s spoke of a life of excess. On the page, she drifted through the City of Lights in a cloud of perfume and laughter. Always a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Always someone beautiful in her bed. There were drugs. Parties. Constance described the taste of absinthe from her lover’s tongue, and how later that lover had committed suicide and she hadn’t wept.
Everett paused. The 1920s. Constance would be ninety-five by now. Older. But the woman Everett had met couldn’t be older than forty, and even that was pushing it.
A ghost? But her fingers had been solid enough brushing his hand. Not dead, she’d claimed, but not alive, either. A paradox, like the book, like the collection stretching around them in the library.
Everett’s mouth grew dry. It was real. Constance wasn’t a hallucination. Irrational as it might be, the thud of his pulse insisted it was the truth. He turned the page.
Then, amidst the glitter and glamour, I found myself seated at an outdoor café, enchanted by the particular sound of rain hitting the awning. I was struck with such a sense of melancholy, such terrible sadness, I knew I had to drown. I walked to the Seine. I watched the barges pass. Then I simply stepped forward, and let myself fall. And there, at the bottom of the river, I met the shoggoth.
Everett’s pulse jumped. A shoggoth. He’d read about them in the midnight library, dreamed of summoning one to tear his father apart.
At the bottom of the river, my hollow spaces were filled. I found what I had been missing amidst the bright lights and endless succession of lovers. How dull the conventional configurations of human flesh, the intertwining of mere bodies. With the shoggoth, I was opened.
I drowned and I did not drown. Parted lips to watch silver bubbles float to the surface. The shoggoth slid into me. A slickness, coating my tongue, filling my throat. It became my breath and my blood; it became all of me.
I died and did not die. The Seine crouched on my chest like a ravenous beast, and kissed me gently as I watched stars scatter the Parisian sky through the beveled glass of its waters. The shoggoth slit my throat. Gave me gills for the river to lick and tease. All of us together—river, woman, shoggoth—a consummation and conflagration unlike any I’d experienced before. Reshaped, my ribs canted outward, fingers lengthened, growing gossamer webs. Every part of me was tasted with a thousand mouths. In ecstasy, I was Transformed.
Everett’s skin flushed hot and cold. Constance described a lover, not a monster - perversion, not vengeance. The parrot-that-wasn’t-a-parrot on her shoulder, the way it nuzzled her ear, caressed her throat with a beak sharp enough to draw blood. The way it moved down her arm and the corresponding shudder and flicker of Constance’s eyelids.
Everett gagged, but at the same time, his skin puckered, pulling tight around every hair. Disgusted, he tossed the book aside.
He wasn’t any closer to sleep, any closer to peace with himself, or shedding his childhood fears. All he had was an impossible book given to him by an impossible woman. Everett pulled the covers over his head, willing his pulse to calm, his mind to empty, but knowing sleep wouldn’t find him.
Above the library, the sky bruised toward dark. Everett glanced over his shoulder, but he was alone on the steps. As predicted he’d barely slept, and now low-level exhaustion hummed between his bones. Maybe it was that exhaustion, but Everett had come full circle in his thinking since early this morning. He wanted to talk to Constance; he wanted an explanation for what he’d rea
d and what he’d seen.
Inside the library, he climbed to the mezzanine.
“Constance?” His whisper felt like a shout, but no one came to shush him. Once again, he was the only librarian here.
“Constance.” He let his voice grow louder.
Her name caromed off the shelves, echoing back to him, answered by the thump of a book falling and the sound of rifled pages. Delicate laughter followed. Everett wound through the shelves until he found the fallen book—Famous Hauntings of New England.
“Very funny.” He slid the book back into place.
“I thought so.” Constance spoke against his ear.
He spun, and found himself looking directly into her over-large eyes. She pouted amusement, lowering the icy—or so he imagined—finger she’d been about to brush against the back of his neck. Her parrot, her shoggoth, trilled softly.
“Don’t be jealous.” She stroked the creature and the noise changed to a purr. “I only wanted to see if he liked my book. Did you?”
Her attention back on him, Everett opened his mouth and closed it again. His body vibrated to the frequency of the shoggoth’s purr.
“Yes. I mean no. I mean…” Everything he’d meant to say fled his mind; certainty turned to doubt.
“You can tell me honestly. I can take it.” She leaned closer, her earnest gaze threatening to swallow him. “I’m my own worst critic, nothing you can say could possibly hurt me.”
“My father is a monster.” Everett blurted the words before fully considering them.
“He…” Everett stopped, rolling back his sleeve to show one of the perfectly round scars on his forearm.
He could still smell the burned flesh. He couldn’t remember what he’d done, or hadn’t done, to provoke this particular wound. Not that it mattered; his father didn’t need a reason.
He smoothed his sleeve back into place. Constance’s eyes were dark and serious. Everett closed his own eyes, uncertain why he was telling her this. He only knew it was easier to talk to her with his eyes closed.
“I used to think maybe I could summon a monster to devour my father. Or that I could open a portal to another world and run away.”
Everett opened his eyes again. Constance was still watching him.
“Did you read the book?” she asked.
“Yes. Some of it.” Confused, Everett shook his head. Was she even listening to him?
“My lover. The one who died. It was my fault. I could have helped, but I didn’t. Let me help you,” Constance said.
“I don’t need saving. I don’t know what I need.” Exhaustion catching up with him made it hard to think. Everett pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Call him,” Constance said. “Call your father. Confront him.”
Everett looked at her sharply. He couldn’t read her expression. In one instant, it was dark and hungry, the next sympathetic.
“So you’re helping me because you couldn’t save your lover?”
“Or because I’m bored.” Constance’s expression shifted again, quick-silver, turning wicked and mischievous. “The Paradox Collection is hungry, and it wants souls.”
She wiggled her fingers, extending her arms in a classic monster movie pose, rolling her eyes back in her skull. She broke into laughter—the champagne and crystal sound that made him think of New Year’s Eve. Then her expression grew serious again.
“I know a thing or two about monsters. Keep reading the book. There are other ways to deal with darkness, with pain.”
“What are you?” It wasn’t what he’d meant to say; the words slipped out, too late to call them back.
A hint of pity showed in Constance’s eyes. “Do you really want to know?”
Before Everett could answer, Constance caught his hand, pressing it to the side of her neck. Beneath his hand, her flesh opened, slit gills fluttering rhythmically.
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons, even death may die.”
Everett tried to pull away, but Constance was stronger than she looked. Darkness pooled in her eyes, threatening to spill over. They shifted to a muddy color between green and gray, silty water made for drowning. Flecks moved in their depths, tiny minnows darting, wrong, impossible things pressed against a door that shouldn’t exist.
Quick as a heartbeat, the shoggoth slid down Constance’s arm, and wrapped itself around their clasped hands. All the breath rushed from Everett’s lungs. He gasped, struggling to refill them. The next breath in was cold—the shock of a body hitting water, the space between the stars.
The shoggoth slid back up Constance’s arm, becoming a parrot again. The door to the Paradox Collection appeared—the skin of the world, waiting to be pierced.
“That’s just a taste.” Constance leaned in, her teeth close and sharp. “You get to choose, but the Paradox Collection won’t wait forever.”
She let go of his hand. Everett staggered back. Her throat slit itself again, gills pumping water, pumping blood. She flickered—whole and broken, drowned and not. A puddle dripped from Constance’s beaded hem, tendrils of water reaching toward him.
“We’re not all monsters,” Constance said. “Except we are.”
Panic hammered at him. Everett tried to blink Constance back into normalcy. But the more he did, the stranger she became. Teeth sharp, skin translucent, fingers webbed. Wrists open and adding to the dripping on the floor. Her mouth too wide. Her eyes too large.
Everett back-pedaled, tripping over his heels. He grabbed at a shelf, knocking books onto the floor. His tailbone struck hard, jarring pain up his spine. Books thudded against his skin. When he lowered his arms, Constance was gone. Among the fallen books, one lay open on his lap. Constance’s slim volume, which he’d never removed from his bag.
The County Library, once a private home, was a striking contrast to Miskatonic’s vast spaces. There was barely room to move between the shelves, but the claustrophobia made Everett feel safe. Even though it looked nothing like the Municipal Library back home, he half-expected Mrs. Stadhoff to appear at any moment, carrying a plate of microwave s’mores.
The thought made Everett’s chest ache as he sat at one of the reading stations tucked under what had once been a bedroom window. He’d sent flowers for Mrs. Stadhoff’s funeral, but he’d been too much of a coward to go home. And for what? His father had found him anyway.
He pulled out the letter. It had been folded and unfolded so many times, the paper had grown velvet soft at the creases. His father had written a phone number at the bottom. Glancing around to make sure he wouldn’t disturb any other patrons, Everett pulled out his phone.
He dialed without giving himself time to think about it. If his father answered, he’d hang up. At the sound of the voice, the one from his nightmares, Everett froze. Blood rushed in his ears, a roar that swept away everything else so it took him a moment to register the beep signaling it as voicemail.
“I got your letter.” Everett spoke in a rush. “I don’t know if you’re already on your way, but I’ll be at the library if you want to talk to me.”
He gave Miskatonic’s address, and hung up, hands shaking. He’d done it, and it was too late to undo it now.
Everett pulled Constance’s book from his bag. He needed a distraction, anything to keep himself from thinking about what he’d just done. He turned to the section following Constance’s account of her transformation.
Lavinia Whatley: An Oral History
In most accounts of ‘the horror’ at Dunwich, Lavinia Whatley is a victim. A poor, clueless girl, stumbling upon her father’s Necronomicon and unwittingly summoning something terrible. I know Lavinia. Her skin like milk skimmed of all its cream. Her eyes pink as washed blood, almost lashless.
Lavinia’s true story is a love story. Accounts speak of her two children, but her children are more numerous than those of the Black Goat of a Thousand Young, and more painfully beautiful than the light of all the dead and unknown stars shining all at once.
Her true s
tory never happened, just as I drowned and did not drown.
This is what she told me:
“As I slept, my body traveled among the stars. I passed through a mirror made of living blood and bone. I descended staircases built into a bending of the universe. I walked barefoot down steps of basalt, to a warm, red sea. I wasn’t afraid, and because of that, Yog-Sothoth came to me.
“There, on the lavender shore, crystalline black sand between my toes, and the tide licking my feet, They came to me. They tasted my lack of fear, and They put the taste of it in my mouth. Ripe raspberries, fresh-picked from the bush, caught on the edge between tart and sweet. There, on the black shore, They loved me.
“Then I woke in my bed, in a room that was finite and did not fold and unfold all the impossible angles of the universe. I howled my sorrow. But not for long. Having tasted that other place, having known true love, I refused to be alone.
“I stole my father’s Necronomicon. I called Yog-Sothoth to me on this plane, where my flesh ached for lack of Them. And They came. Across the stars. I filled Them, and They enfolded me. I and They and WE were one. On this plane, on every plane. The stars were OUR skin and the space between them OUR bones. WE were the blood-warm sea and the folds in time. Even apart, WE are together. My belly swells; OUR children will be lovely.”
Everett set the book aside, a different kind of trembling starting in his limbs. He remembered the story of Lavinia Whatley. Old Whatley, Wilbur, and the Horror. No mention of any other children.
Lavinia Whatley disappeared in 1926, but what if she hadn’t? What if she’d run away to live between the stars? Like Constance, drowned but not drowned. Two histories, two accounts of the world. Both true.
Everett picked up the book again. What was Constance trying to tell him? That not all monsters were terrible? That a body could be dead and alive at the same time? That the other worlds he’d always wanted to believe in as a child really existed?
The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library Page 12
